Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 Part 4

Donations in an age of great munificence, and horror of far-off or unattractive sins, like the slaveholding of Southerners and the intemperance of the miserable poor, are not, and ought not to be, accepted as signs of inward and spiritual grace, and of readiness to scale "the toppling crags of duty."

The conversion of the working-cla.s.ses, too, it is safe to say, will never be accomplished by any ecclesiastical organization which sells cus.h.i.+oned pews at auction, or rents them at high rates, and builds million-dollar churches for the accommodation of one thousand wors.h.i.+ppers. The pa.s.sion for equality has taken too strong hold of the workingman to make it possible to catch him with cheap chapels and a.s.sistant pastors. He will not seek salvation _in forma pauperis_, and thinks the best talent in the ministerial market not a whit too good for him. He not unnaturally doubts the sincerity of Christians who are not willing to kneel beside badly dressed persons in prayer on the one day of the week when prayer is public. In fact, to fit the Protestant Church in this country to lay hold of the laboring population a great process of reconstruction would be necessary. The congregational system would have to be abandoned or greatly modified, the common fund made larger and administered in a different way. There would have, in short, to be a close approach to the Roman Catholic organization, and the churches would have to lose the character of social clubs, which now makes them so comfortable and attractive. Well-to-do Christians would have to sacrifice their tastes in a dozen ways, and give up the expectation of aesthetic pleasure in public wors.h.i.+p. There cannot be a vast Gothic cathedral for the mult.i.tude in every city. The practice of the church would have to be forced up to its own theory of its character and mission, which would involve serious collision with some of the most deeply rooted habits and ideas of modern social and political life. That there is any immediate probability of this we do not believe. Until it is brought about, its members must make up their minds to have religious professions treated by some as but slight guarantees of character, and by others as but cloaks of wrong-doing, hard as this may be for that large majority to whom they are an honest expression of sure hopes and n.o.ble aims.

RoLE OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN POLITICS

Mr. Galton, in his work on "Hereditary Genius," has drawn attention in a striking chapter to the effect which the systematic destruction and expatriation, by the Inquisition or the religious intolerance of the government, of the leading men of the nation--its boldest thinkers, most ardent investigators, most prudent and careful and ingenious workers, in generation after generation--had in bringing about the moral and political decline of the three great Latin countries, France, Spain, and Italy--a decline of which, in the case of the two former at least, we have probably not seen the end. The persons killed or banished amounted only to a few thousands every year, but they were--no matter from what rank they came--the flower of the population: the men whose labor and whose influence enabled the State to keep its place in the march of civilization. The picture is very valuable (particularly just now, when there is so great a disposition to revel in the consciousness of vast numbers), as calling attention to the smallness of the area within which, after all, the sources of national greatness and progress are to be sought. The mind which keeps the ma.s.s in motion, which saves and glorifies it, would most probably, if we could lay bare the secret of national life, be found in the possession of a very small proportion of the people, though not in any cla.s.s in particular-- neither among the rich nor the poor, the learned nor simple, capitalists nor laborers; but the abstraction of these few from the sum of national existence, though it would hardly be noticed in the census, would produce a fatal languor, were the nation not constantly receiving fresh blood from other countries.

This element was singled out with considerable accuracy in France and Spain by religious persecution. It would happily be impossible to devise any process of selection one-quarter as efficient in our age or in this country. The one we have been using for the last twenty years, and on which a good deal of popular reliance has been placed, is the acc.u.mulation of wealth; and under this "the self-made man"--that is, the man who, starting in life ignorant and poor, has made a large fortune, and got control of a great many railroads and mines and factories--has risen into the front rank of eminence. The events of the last five years, however, have had a damaging effect on his reputation, and he now stands as low as his worst enemies could desire. As he declines, the man of some kind of training naturally rises; and it would be running no great risk to affirm that the popular mind inclines more than it has usually done to the belief that trained men--that is, men who have been prepared for their work by teaching on approved methods--are after all the most valuable possession a country can have, and that a country is well or ill off in proportion as they are numerous or the reverse. One does not need to travel very far from this position to reach the conclusion that there is probably no way in which we could strike so deadly a blow at the happiness and progress of the United States as by sweeping away, by some process of proscription kept up during a few generations, the graduates of the princ.i.p.al colleges. In no other way could we make so great a drain on the reserved force of character, ambition, and mental culture which const.i.tutes so large a portion of the national vitality. They would not be missed at the polls, it is true, and if they were to run a candidate for the Presidency to-morrow their vote would excite great merriment among the politicians; but if they were got rid of regularly for forty or fifty years in the manner we have suggested, and nothing came in from the outside to supply their places, the politicians would somehow find that they themselves had less public money to vote or steal, less national aspiration to trade upon, less national force to direct, less national dignity to maintain or lose, and that, in fact, by some mysterious process, they were getting to be of no more account in the world than their fellows in Guatemala or Costa Rica.

There will come to the colleges of the United States during the next fifty years a larger and larger number of men who either strongly desire training for themselves or are the sons of men who are deeply sensible of its advantages, and therefore are at the head of families which possess and appreciate the traditions of high civilization, and would like to live in them and contribute their share to perpetuating them--and they will not come from any one portion of the country. There are, unhappily, "universities" in all parts of the Union, but there is hardly a doubt that as the means of communication are improved and cheapened, and as the real nature and value of the university education become better understood, the tendency to use the small local inst.i.tutions pa.s.sing by this name as, what they really are, high schools, and resort to the half-dozen colleges which can honestly call themselves universities, will increase. The demands which modern culture, owing to the advance of science and research in every field, now makes on a university, in the shape of professors, books, apparatus, are so great that only the largest and wealthiest inst.i.tutions can pretend to meet them, and in fact there is something very like false pretence in the promise to do so held out to poor students by many of the smaller colleges. These colleges doubtless do a certain amount of work very creditably; but they are uncandid in saying that they give a university education, and in issuing diplomas purporting to be certificates that any such education has either been sought or received. The idea of maintaining a university for the sake of the local glory of it is a form of folly which ought not to be a.s.sociated with education in any stage. These considerations are now felt to be so powerful in other countries that they threaten the destruction of a whole batch of universities in Italy which have come down famous and honored from the Middle Ages and have sent out twenty generations of students, and they are causing even the very best of the smaller universities in Germany, great and efficient as many of them are, to tremble for their existence.

There is no interest of learning, therefore, which would not be served by the greater concentration of the resources of the country as regards university education, still less is there any interest of society or politics. It is of the last importance that the cla.s.s of men from all parts of the country whom the universities send out into the world should as far as possible be educated together, and start on their careers with a common stock of traditions, tastes, and a.s.sociations. Much as steam and the telegraph have done, and will do, to diminish for administrative purposes the size of the Republic, and to simplify the work of government, they cannot prevent the creation of a certain diversity of interests, and even of temperament and manners, through differences of climate and soil and productions. There will never come a time when we shall not have more or less of such folly as the notion that the South and West need more money than the East, because they have less capital, or the struggle of some parts of the country for a close market against other parts which seek an open one. Nothing but a reign of knowledge and wisdom, such as centuries will not bring, will prevent States on the Gulf or on the Pacific from fancying that their interests are not identical with those of the Northern Atlantic, and nothing but profound modifications in the human const.i.tution will ever bring the California wheat-raiser into complete sympathy with the New England shoemaker.

The work of our political system for ages to come will consist largely in keeping these differences in check; and in doing it, it will need all the help it can get from social and educational influences. It ought to be the aim, therefore, of the larger inst.i.tutions of learning to offer every inducement in their power to students from all parts of the Union, and more especially from the South, as the region which is most seriously threatened by barbarism, and in which the sense of national unity and the hold of national traditions on the popular mind are now feeblest. We at the North owe to the civilized men at the South who are now, no matter what their past faults or delusions may have been, struggling to save a large portion of the Union from descent into heathen darkness and disorder, the utmost help and consideration. We owe them above all a free and generous welcome to a share in whatever means of culture we have at our disposal, and ought to offer it, as far as is consistent with our self-respect, in a shape that will not wound theirs.

The question of the manner of doing this came up incidentally at Harvard the other day, at the dedication of the great hall erected in memory of the graduates of the university who died in the war.

The hall is to be used for general college purposes, for examinations, and some of the ceremonial of commencement, as well as for dinner, and a portion of the walls is covered with tablets bearing the names of those to whose memory it is dedicated. The question whether the building would keep alive the remembrance of the civil war in any way in which it is inexpedient to keep it alive, or in any way which would tend to keep Southern students away from the university, has been often asked, and by some answered in the affirmative. General Devens, who presided at the alumni dinner, gave full and sufficient answer to those who find fault with the rendering of honor on the Northern side to those who fell in its cause; but General Bartlett--who perhaps more than any man living is qualified to speak for those who died in the war--uttered, in a burst of unpremeditated eloquence, at the close of the proceedings, the real reason why no Southern man need, and we hope will never, feel hurt by Northern memorials of the valor and constancy of Northern soldiers. It is not altogether the cause which enn.o.bles fighting; it is the spirit in which men fight; and no horror of the objects of the Southern insurrection need prevent anybody from admiring or lamenting the gallant men who honestly, loyally, and from a sense of duty perished in its service. It is not given to the wisest and best man to choose the right side; but the simplest and humblest knows whether it is his conscience which bids him lay down his life. And this test may be applied by each side to all the victims of the late conflict without diminis.h.i.+ng by one particle its faith in the justice of its own cause. Moreover, as General Bartlett suggested, the view of the nature of the struggle which is sure to gain ground all over the country as the years roll on is that it was a fierce and pa.s.sionate but inevitable attempt to settle at any cost a controversy which could be settled in no other way; and that all who shared in it, victors or vanquished, helped to save the country and establish its government on sure and lasting foundations. This feeling cannot grow without bringing forcibly to mind the fact that the country was saved through the war that virtue might increase, that freedom might spread and endure, and that knowledge might rule, and not that politicians might have a treasury to plunder and marble halls to exchange their vituperation in; thus uniting the best elements of Northern and Southern society by the bonds of honest indignation as well as of n.o.ble hopes.

THE HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

The _Baltimore American_, discussing the plan of the Hopkins University in that city, says: "The _Nation_ suggests to the Board of Trustees a university that would leave Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the elements of natural science out of its curriculum." This is so great a mistake that we are at a loss to understand how it could have been made. The _Nation_ has never suggested anything of the kind. The university which the _Nation_ has expressed the hope the trustees would found is simply a university with such a high standard for admission on all subjects that the professors would be saved the necessity of teaching the rudiments of either Latin, Greek, mathematics, or natural science; or, in other words, that the country would be saved considerable waste of skilled labor. The reason why we have ventured to expect this of the Hopkins trustees is that they enjoy the all but unprecedented advantage of being left in possession of a very large bequest, with complete liberty, within very wide limits, as to the disposition of it. In other words, they are to found a university with it, but as to the kind of university they may exercise their discretion.

That this is a very exceptional position everybody familiar with the history of American colleges knows. All the older colleges are bound to the state, or to certain religious denominations, by laws or usages or precedents which impose a certain tolerably fixed character either on the subjects or on the mode of teaching them, or on both. They have traditions to uphold, or denominational interests to care for, or political prejudices to satisfy. The newer ones, on the other hand, are apt to have incurred a bondage even worse still, in having to carry out the wishes of a founder who, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, had only a faint notion of the nature and needs of a university, and in endowing one sought rather to erect a monument to his memory than to found a seat of learning. In so far as he was interested in the curriculum, he probably desired that it should be such as would satisfy some want which he himself felt, or thought he felt, in early life, or should diffuse some social or religious or political crotchet on which his fancy had secretly fed during his years of active exertion, and on the success of which he came to think, in the latter part of his life, that the best interests of the community were dependent. The number of these honorably ambitious but ill-informed and somewhat eccentric testators increases every year, as the country grows in wealth and the habit of giving to public objects gains in strength.

The consequence is that we are threatened with the spectacle during the coming century of a great waste of money by well-meaning persons in the establishment all over the country of inst.i.tutions calling themselves "universities," which are either so feebly equipped as rather to hinder than help the cause of education, or so completely committed by their organization to the propagation of certain social or religious theories as to deserve the appellation of mission stations rather than of colleges. Education is now an art of exceeding delicacy and complexity. To master it, so as to have a trustworthy opinion as to the relative value of studies and as to the best mode of pursuing them, and as to the organization of inst.i.tutions devoted to the work of instruction, a man needs both learning and experience. The giving him money to employ in his special work, therefore, without leaving him discretion as to the manner in which he shall use it, is to prepare almost certainly for its waste in more than one direction. To make the most of the resources of the country for educational purposes, it is necessary above all things that they should be placed at the disposal of those who have made education a special study, and who are free, as we understand the Hopkins trustees to be, from any special bias or bond, and are ready or willing to look at the subject from every side.

Their liberty, of course, brings with it great responsibility--all the greater for the reasons we have been enumerating.

Now, as to the use which they should make of this liberty, the _Baltimore American_ fears that if they found a university of the cla.s.s sketched by us some weeks ago, "the people of Maryland would be greatly disappointed--there would not be over fifty students,"

and "there would be a great outcry against the investment of three and a half millions of dollars for the benefit of so small a number." Whether the people of Maryland will be disappointed or not, depends on the amount of consideration they give the matter. If they are satisfied that the foundation of such a university as is now talked of is the best use that can be made of the money, they will not be disappointed, and there will be no "outcry" at all. Being an intelligent people, they will on reflection see that the value of a university by no means depends solely on the proportion borne by the number of its students to the amount of its revenues, because, judged in this way--that is, as instruments of direct popular benefit--all the universities in the country might be p.r.o.nounced failures. The bulk of the community derives no direct benefit from them at all. Harvard, for instance, has an endowment of about five million dollars, we believe, and the total number of the students is only 1,200, while the population of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts is 1,500,000, so that, even supposing all the students to come from Ma.s.sachusetts, which they do not, less than one person in every thousand profits by the university.

The same story might be told of Yale or any other college.

Considered as what are called popular inst.i.tutions--that is, inst.i.tutions from which everybody can or does derive some calculable, palpable benefit--the universities of this and every other country are useless, and there ought on this theory to be a prodigious "outcry" against them, and they ought, on the principle of equality, if allowed to exist at all, to be allowed to exist only on condition that they will give a degree, or at least offer an education, to every male citizen of sound mind. But n.o.body takes this view of them. The poorest and most ignorant hod-carrier would not hold, if asked, that because he cannot go to college there ought to be no colleges. Sensible people in every country acknowledge that a high education can in the nature of things be only obtained by a very small proportion of the population; but that the few who seek it, and can afford to take it, should get it, and should get it of the best quality, they hold to be a public benefit. Now, why a public benefit? The service that Harvard or Yale renders to the community certainly does not lie simply in the fact that it qualifies a thousand young men every year to earn a livelihood. They would earn a livelihood whether they went to college or not. The vast majority of men earn a livelihood without going to college or thinking of it. Indeed, it is doubted by many persons, and with much show of reason, whether a man does not earn it all the more readily for not going to college at all; and as regards the work of the world of all kinds, the great bulk of it is done, and well done, by persons who have not received a university education and do not regret it. So that the benefits which the country derives from the universities consists mainly in the refining and elevating influences which they create, in the taste for study and research which they diffuse, in the social and political ideals which they frame and hold up for admiration, in the confidence in the power of knowledge which they indirectly spread among the people, and in the small though steady contributions they make to that reverence for "things not seen" in which the soul of the state may be said to lie, and without which it is nothing better than a factory or an insurance company.

There is nothing novel about the considerations we are here urging.

The problem over which university reformers have been laboring in every country during the past forty years has been, how to rid the universities, properly so called, of the care of the feeble, inefficient, and poorly prepared students, and reserve their teaching for the better-fitted, older, and more matured; or, in other words, how, in the interest both of economy and culture, to reserve the highest teaching power of the community for the most promising material. It is forty years since John Stuart Mill wrote a celebrated attack on the English universities, then in a very low condition, in which he laid it down broadly that the end above all for which endowed universities ought to exist was "to keep alive philosophy," leaving "the education of common minds for the common business of life" for the most part to private enterprise. This seemed at the time exacting too much, and it doubtless seems so still; but it is nevertheless true that ever since that period universities of the highest cla.s.s, both in Europe and in this country, have been working in that direction--striving, that is to say, either to sift the applicants for admission, by imposing increasingly severe tests, and thus presenting to the professors only pupils of the highest grade to work upon; or, at all events, if not repelling the ill-fitted, expending all their strength in furnis.h.i.+ng the highest educational advantages to the well-fitted. In the last century, Harvard and Yale were doing just the kind of work that the high schools now do--that is, taking young lads and teaching them the elements of literature. At the present day they are throwing this work as far as possible on the primary schools, and reserving their professors and libraries and apparatus, as far as the state of the country and the conditions of their organization will permit, for those older and more advanced students who bring to the work of learning both real ardor and real preparation. A boy has to know more to get into either of them to-day than his grandfather knew when he graduated. Nevertheless, with all the efforts they can make after this true economy of power and resources, there is in both of them a large amount of waste of labor. There are men in both of them, and in various other colleges, much of whose work is almost as much a misuse of energy and time as if they were employed so many hours a day in carrying hods of mortar, simply because they are doing what the masters of primary schools ought to do, and what no man at a university ought to be asked to do. It is a kind of work, too, which, if it have to be done in colleges at all, is already abundantly provided for by endowment. No Maryland youth who desires to learn a little mathematics, get a smattering of cla.s.sics, and some faint notions of natural science, or even to support himself by manual labor while doing this, will suffer if the Hopkins endowment is used for higher work. The country swarms already with inst.i.tutions which meet his needs, and in which he can graduate with ease to himself and credit to his State. The trustees of this one will do him and the State and the whole country most service, therefore, by providing a place to which, after he has got hold of the rudiments at some other college, he can come, if he has the right stuff in him, and pursue to the end the studies for which all universities should really be reserved.

THE SOUTH AFTER THE WAR

I

September 8, 1877.

Having just returned from a few weeks' stay in Virginia it has occurred to me as probable that your readers would be interested in hearing how such changes in Southern manners and tone of thought and economical outlook as could be noted in a brief visit strike one who had travelled in that region before the war had revolutionized it.

It is now twenty years since I spent a winter traversing the Cotton States on horseback, sleeping at the house which happened to be nearest when the night caught me. Buchanan had just been elected; the friends of slavery, though anxious, were exultant and defiant, and the possibility of a separate political future had begun to take definite shape in the public mind, at least in the Gulf States. I am unable to compare the economical condition of that part of the country at that time with its condition to-day, because both slavery and agriculture in Virginia differed then in many important respects from slavery and agriculture farther south. But the habits and modes of thought and feeling bred by slavery were essentially the same all over the South; and I do not think that I shall go far astray in a.s.suming that the changes in these which I have noticed in Virginia would be found to-day in all the other States.

The first which struck me, and it was a most agreeable one, was what I may call the emanc.i.p.ation which conversation and social intercourse with Northerners had undergone. In 1857 the tone of nearly everybody with whom I came in contact, however veiled by politeness, was in some degree irritable and defiant. My host and I were never long before the evening fire without my finding that he was impatient to talk about slavery, that he suspected me of disliking it, and yet that he wished to have me understand that he did not care, and that n.o.body at the South cared two cents what I thought about it, and that it was a little impertinent in me, who knew so little of the negro, to have any opinion about it at all. I was obliged, too, to confess inwardly that there was a good deal of justification for his bad temper. There was I, a curious stranger, roving through his country and eating at his board, and all the while secretly or openly criticising or condemning his relations with his laborers and servants, and, in fact, the whole scheme of his domestic life. I was not a pleasant companion, and nothing could make me one, and no matter on what themes our talk ran, it was colored by our opinions on the inst.i.tution. He looked at nearly everything in politics and society from what might be called the slaveholder's point of view, and suspected me, on the other hand, of disguising reprobation of the South and its inst.i.tutions in any praise of the North or of France or England which I might utter. So that there was a certain acridity and a sense of strong and deep limitations and reserves in our discussions, somewhat like those which are felt in the talk of a pious evangelical Protestant with a pious Catholic.

In Virginia of to-day I was conscious of a curious change in the atmosphere, as if the windows of a close room had been suddenly opened. I found that I was in a country where all things were debatable, and where I had not to be on the lookout for susceptibilities. The negro, too, about whom I used to have to be so careful, with whom I used to make it a point of honor not to talk privately or apart from his master when I was staying on a plantation, was wandering about loose, as it were, and n.o.body seemed to care anything about him any more than about any poor man. I found every Southerner I spoke to as ready to discuss him as to discuss sheep or oxen, to let you have your own views about him just as you had them about sheep or oxen. Moreover, I found instead of the stereotyped orthodox view of his place and capacity which prevailed in 1857, a great variety of opinions about him, mostly depreciatory, it is true, but still varying in degree as well as in kind. It is difficult to give anyone who has never had any experience of the old slave society an idea of the difference this makes in a stranger's position at the South. In short, as one Southerner expressed it to me on my mentioning the change, "Yes, sir, we have been brought into intellectual and moral relations with the rest of the civilized world." All subjects are now open at the South in conversation.

Is this true? it will probably be asked, with regard to the late war. Can you talk freely about that? Not exactly; but then the limitations on your discourse on this point are not peculiar to the South; they are such as would be put upon the discourse of two parties to a b.l.o.o.d.y contest in any civilized country among well-bred men or women. The events of the war you can discuss freely, but you are hardly at liberty to denounce Southern soldiers or officers, or accuse them of "rebellion," or to a.s.sume that they fought for base or wicked motives. Moreover, in a certain sense, all Southerners are still "unrepentant rebels." Doubtless, in view of the result, they will acknowledge that the war was a gigantic mistake; but I found that if I sought for an admission that, if it was all to do over again, they would not fight, I was touching on a very tender point, and I was gently but firmly repelled. The reason is plain enough. In confessing this, they would, they think, be confessing that their sons and brothers and fathers had perished miserably in a causeless struggle on which they ought never to have entered, and this, of course, would look like a slur on their memory, and their memory is still, after the lapse of twelve years, very sacred and very dear. I doubt if many people at the North have an adequate notion of the intensity of the emotions with which Southerners look back on the war; and I mean tender and not revengeful or malignant emotions. The losses of the battle-field were deeply felt at the North--in many households down to the very roots of life; but on the whole they fell on a large and prosperous population, on a community which in the very thick of the fray seemed to be rolling up wealth, which revelled as it fought, and came out of the battle triumphant, exultant, and powerful. At the South they swept through a scanty population with the most searching destructiveness, and when all was over they had to be wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a society which was wrecked from top to bottom, and in which all relatives and friends had sunk together to common perdition. There has been no other such cataclysm in history. Great states have been conquered before now, but conquest did not mean a sudden and desolating social revolution; so that to a Southerner the loss of relatives on the battle-field or in the hospital is a.s.sociated with the loss of everything else. A gentleman told me of his going, at the close of the war, into a little church in South Carolina on Sunday, and finding it filled with women, who were all in black, and who cried during the singing. It reminded one of the scene in the cathedral at Leyden, when the people got together to chant a _Te Deum_ on hearing that the besieging army was gone; but, the music suddenly dying out, the air was filled with the sounds of sobbing.

The Leydeners, however, were weak and half-starved people, weeping over a great deliverance; these South Carolinians were weeping before endless bereavement and hopeless poverty. I doubt much if any community in the modern world was ever so ruthlessly brought face to face with what is sternest and hardest in human life; and those of them who have looked at it without flinching have something which any of us may envy them.

But then I think it would be a mistake to suppose that Southerners came out of the war simply sorrowful. At the close, and for some time afterward, they undoubtedly felt fiercely and bitterly, and hated while they wept; and this was the primal difficulty of reconstruction. Frequently in conversation I heard some violent speech or act occurring soon after the war mentioned with the parenthetical explanation, "You know, I felt very bitterly at that time." But, then, I have always heard it from persons who are to day good-tempered, conciliatory, and hopeful, and desirous of cultivating good relations with Northerners; from which the inference, which so many Northern politicians find it so hard to swallow, is easy--viz., that time produces on Southerners its usual effects. What Mr. Boutwell and Mr. Blaine would have us believe is that Southerners are a peculiar breed of men, on whom time produces no effect whatever, and who feel about things that happened twenty years ago just as they feel about things which happened a month ago.

The fact is, however, that they are in this respect like the rest of the human race. Time has done for their hearts and heads what it has done for the old Virginia battle-fields. There was not in 1865 a fence standing between the Potomac and Gordonsville, and but few, if any, undamaged houses. When I pa.s.sed Mana.s.sas Junction the other day there was a hospitable-looking tavern and several houses at the station; the flowers were blooming in the yard, and crowds of young men and women in their Sunday clothes were gathered from the country around to see a base-ball match, and a well-tilled and well-fenced and smiling farming country stretched before my eyes in every direction. The only trace of the old fights was a rude graveyard filled, as a large sign informed us, with "the Confederate dead."

All the rest of the way down to the springs the road ran through farms which looked as prosperous and peaceful as if the tide of war had not rolled over them inside a hundred years, and it is impossible to talk with the farmers ten minutes without seeing how thoroughly human and Anglo-Saxon they are. With them the war is history--tender, touching, and heroic history if you will, but having no sort of connection with the practical life of to-day. Some of us at the North think their minds are occupied with schemes for the a.s.sa.s.sination and spoliation of negroes, and for a "new rebellion." Their minds are really occupied with making money, and the farms show it, and their designs on the negro are confined to getting him to work for low wages. His wages are low--forty cents a day and rations, which cost ten cents--but he is content with it. I saw negroes seeking employment at this rate, and glad to get it; and in the making of the bargain nothing could be more commercial, apparently, than the relations of the parties. They were evidently laborer and employer to each other, and nothing more.

The state of things on two farms which I visited may serve as ill.u.s.trations of the process of regeneration which is going on all over Virginia. They are two hundred miles apart. On one of two thousand acres there were, before the war, about one hundred and fifty slaves of all ages. The owner, at emanc.i.p.ation, put them in wagons and deposited them in Ohio. His successor now works the plantation with twelve hired men, who see to his cattle, of which he raises and feeds large herds. His cultivation is carried on on shares by white tenants. He has an overseer, makes a snug income, and spends a good part of his winters in Baltimore and New York. He laughs when you ask him if he regrets slavery. Nothing would induce him to take care of one hundred and fifty men, women, and children, furnis.h.i.+ng perhaps thirty able-bodied men, littering the house with a swarm of lazy servants, and making heavy drafts on the meat-house and corn-crib, and running up doctor's bills.

The other was owned at the close of the war by a regular "Virginia gentleman," with the usual swarm of negroes, and who was in debt.

He sold it to an enterprising young farmer from another county, paid his debts, and retired to a small place, where, with two or three hired men, he makes a living. The young farmer, instead of seventy-five slaves, works it with twelve hands in the busy season and three in winter, is up at five o'clock in the morning superintending them himself, raises all raisable crops, and is as intent on the markets and the experiments made by his neighbors as if he lived in Illinois or the Ca.r.s.e of Gowrie. He was led by Colonel Waring's book to try tile-draining, and made the tiles for the purpose on his own land. He was so successful that he now manufactures and soils tiles extensively to others. It would be difficult to meet at the North or in England two men with their faces turned away from the old times more completely than these, more averse from the old plantation ways; and, as far as I could learn or hear, they are fair specimens of the kind of men who are taking possession of the Old Dominion. Their neighbors consist of three cla.s.ses: men who had by extraordinary exertions saved some or all of their land after the war, and had by borrowing or economizing managed to stock it, and are now prospering, by dint of close management and constant attention, on the Northern plan; young and enterprising men who had bought at low rates from original proprietors whom the war left hopelessly involved, and too old or incapable to recover; and a sprinkling of Northern and English immigrants.

II

The part played by the Virginia springs in the political and social life of "the States lately in rebellion," is to a traveller most interesting. The attraction of these springs to Southerners has been in times past, and is still, largely due to the fact that the South has, properly speaking, no other watering-places. Seaside resorts there are none worth mention, from Norfolk down to Mexico, and there are but few points of the long, level, dull, and sandy coast-line which are not more or less unhealthy. Suspicion on this point even hangs around the places in Florida now frequented by Northerners for the sake of the mild winter temperature. But oven if the sea-coast were healthy, it is in summer too hot to be attractive, and offers no relief to persons whose livers and kidneys have got out of order in the lowlands. These naturally seek the hills for coolness, and they go to the sulphur springs of Virginia because the sulphur waters are very powerful and efficacious in their effects on people afflicted with what the doctors call "hepatic troubles." But then they never would or could have gone from the Southern seaboard to places so far off if it had not been for the inestimable negro. The extent to which he contributed to the rapid pus.h.i.+ng out of the scanty white population of the slave States to the Mississippi has never, I think, received due attention. He robbed pioneering, indeed, at the South of most of the hards.h.i.+p with which it is a.s.sociated in the Northern mind--I was going to say discomfort as well as hards.h.i.+p, but this would be going too far. To the Southern planter, however, who could go West with a party of stalwart negroes to do the clearing, building, ploughing, and cooking and was.h.i.+ng, the wilderness had but few of the terrors it presented to the Northern frontiersman. He was speedily provided with a very tolerable home; not certainly the kind of home which the taste of a man as well off at the North would be satisfied with, but a vastly better one than any new settler in the Northwestern States ever had.

The springs in the Virginia mountains became popular a century ago, and were greatly resorted to in much the same way. They were remote and in the woods, but, owing to slavery, they swarmed from the very first with servants who could not "give notice" if they did not like the place, or felt lonesome.

The first accommodation at the springs consisted of a circle of log-cabins with a dining-hall and ball-room in the centre, and this const.i.tutes the fundamental plan of a spring to this day. There is now always a hotel in which a considerable number of the visitors both sleep and eat, but the bulk of them, or a very large proportion of them, still live in the long rows of one-storied wooden huts, with galleries running along in front of the doors, which are dignified with the name of "cottages," but are in reality simply the log-cabin in the next stage of evolution; and the hotel has taken the place of the original dining and ball-rooms to which all resorted.

In looking at the cottages, and thinking of the log-cabins which preceded them, and seeing what rude places they are, one wonders a little how people could ever have been, or can now be, induced to leave comfortable homes for the purpose of spending long summers in them. But this brings up one of the marked characteristics of Southern life, namely, the extent to which nearly all Southern men and women were led in the slavery days to a.s.sociate comfort not with the trimness and order of Northern or English homes, but with an abundance of service. Well-to-do Northerners used to be surprised, in fact, at the amount of what they would consider discomfort in the way of rude or unfinished surroundings, hard beds, poor fare, want of order of all sorts, which even Southerners in easy circ.u.mstances were willing to put up with; but the explanation lay in the fact that Southerners placed their luxury in having plenty of servants at command. All the ladies had maids and the men "body servants"

wherever they went, and this saved them, even on the frontier, from a great deal of drudgery and inconvenience. Even a log-cabin is not a bad place to lodge in if you have a valet (who cannot leave you) to dress you, and brush your boots and your clothes, and light your fire, and bring you ice-water and juleps and c.o.c.ktails, and anything else you happen to think of, who sleeps comfortably in a blanket across your door. In fact, without this the Virginia springs could never have become a popular resort until railroads were opened.

People used to take twenty days in reaching them from the coast-- some in their own carriages with four horses, and a wagon for the baggage and "darkies," and some in stages, sleeping in taverns on the roadside; but nothing could have made this practicable or tolerable but the band of negroes by whom they were always accompanied.

This, too, enabled them to make their plans with certainty for staying at the springs all summer, which they could not have done had they been unable to count on their servants. One gentleman, a Charlestonian, telling me his reminiscences of these long journeys to the springs taken with his parents in their own carriage, when he was a boy, said his mother was very delicate and her health required it. This at the North would have been a joke, as it would have killed a delicate woman to go into the woods with hired "help"

or without any service at all.

Partly owing to the efficacy of the waters and partly to the absence of other Southern watering-places, the springs became very early the resort of every Southerner who could afford to leave home in the summer, and they grew in favor owing to the peculiarities of Southern society and the delicate state of Southern relations with the North. In the first place, at the South people know each other, and know about each other, in a way of which the inhabitants of a denser and busier community have little idea. The number of persons in Illinois, or Ohio, or Michigan that a New Yorker knows anything about, or cares to see for social purposes, is exceedingly small. At the South everybody with the means to travel has relatives or friends or acquaintances of longer or shorter standing, in nearly every Southern State, whom it is agreeable for him to meet, and he knows that they will probably, at some part of the season or other, appear at the springs. They will not go North because the North is far away, is, in a certain sense, a strange community, and before the war a hostile or critical one. Then, too, the South abounded or abounds with local notables to a degree of which we have no idea at the North, with persons of a certain weight and consequence in their own State or county, and to whom this weight and consequence are so agreeable and important that they cannot bear to part with them when they go on a journey. They could always carry them with them to the springs. There everybody was sure to know their standing, while if they had gone up North they would be lost in the crowd and be n.o.bodies, and, before the war, have been deprived of the services of their "body servants" or labored under constant anxiety about their security.

The springs, too, became, very early, and are now, a great marrying-place. The "desirable young men, all riding on horses," as the prophet called the a.s.syrian swells, go there in search of wives, and are pretty sure to find there all the marriageable young women of the South who can be said in any sense to be in society. Widows abound at the springs just now--by which I mean widows who would not object to trying the chances of matrimony again. I have been told that, since the war, it is not uncommon for families whose means are small to make up a purse to send one attractive youth or maid or forlorn widow to the springs, in the hope that during the season they may find the unknown soul which is to complete their destiny, somewhat like the "culture" donations made to promising people at the North to enable them to visit Europe. Then, too, to that very large proportion of the population at the South who lead during the rest of the year absolutely solitary lives on plantations, the visit to the springs gives the only society of any kind they ever see, and the one chance of showing their clothes and seeing what the other women wear. In short, I do not believe that any one place of summer resort serves so many purposes to any community as the Virginia springs serve to that of the South, and by the springs I mean that circle of mineral waters of various kinds which lie round the White Sulphur, and to which the White Sulphur acts as a kind of distributing reservoir of visitors.

As regards the opinions of the very representative company at the springs on the subject of slavery, it seemed, as well as I could get at it, to be that about one per cent, of the white people regretted the emanc.i.p.ation; but this was composed almost entirely of old persons, who were unable to accommodate themselves to a new order of things, and to whom it meant the loss of personal attendance--perhaps the greatest inconvenience which elderly persons who have been used to valets and maids can undergo. Many such persons at the South were really killed by the social changes produced by the war, as truly as if they had been struck on the battle-field; the bewildered resignation of the survivors is sometimes touching to witness, and the calamity was generally embittered by the wholesale flight of the most trusted household servants, who it was supposed would have despised freedom even if offered in a gold box by Phillips, Garrison, and Greeley in person.

Telling one old gentleman who was mourning over the change that the young men to whom I spoke did not agree with him, but thought it an excellent thing, he replied "that those fellows never had known what domestic comfort was"--meaning that their experience did not run back beyond 1865.

The traditions of the old system are, however, unquestionably a better basis for good hotel-keeping than anything we have at the North. The first condition of excellence in all places of entertainment for man and beast is exactingness on the part of the public. To be well cared for you must expect it and be used to it, and this condition the Southerners fulfil in a much higher degree than we do. They look for more attention, and they therefore get it; and the waiter world, partly from habit and partly, no doubt, from race temperament, render it with a cheerfulness we are not familiar with here. But the superiority of manners in all cla.s.ses is very striking. One rarely meets a man on a Virginia road who does not raise or touch his hat, and this not in a servile way either, but simply as politeness. The bearing of the men toward each other generally, too, has the ineffable charm, which Northern manners are so apt to want, of indicating a recognition of the fact that even if you are no better than any other man, you are different, and that your peculiarities are respectable, and that you are ent.i.tled to a certain amount of deference for your private tastes and habits. At the North, on the other hand, manners, even as taught to children, are apt to concede nothing except that you have an immortal soul and a middling chance of salvation, and to avoid anything which is likely to lead you to forget that you are simply a human male.

CHROMO-CIVILIZATION

The last "statement," it is reasonable to hope, has been made in the Beecher-Tilton case previous to the trial at law, and it is safe to say that it has left the public mind in as unsettled a state as ever before. People do not know what to believe, but they do not want to hear any more newspaper discussion by the princ.i.p.al actors. We are not going to attempt any a.n.a.lysis or summing-up of the case at present. It will be time enough to do that after the _dramatis personae_ have undergone an examination in court, but we would again warn our readers against looking for any decisive result from the legal trial. The expectations on this point which some of the newspapers and a good many lawyers are encouraging are in the highest degree extravagant. The truth is that only a very small portion of the stuff contained in the various "statements" can, under the rules of evidence, be laid before the jury--not, we venture to a.s.sert, more than would fill half a newspaper column in all. What _will_ be laid before the jury is, in the main, "questions of veracity" between three or four persons whose credit is already greatly shaken, or, in other words, the very kind of questions on which juries are most likely to disagree, even when the jurymen are entirely unprejudiced. In the present case they are sure to be prejudiced, and are sure to be governed, consciously or unconsciously, in reaching their conclusions by agencies wholly foreign to the matter in hand, and are thus very likely to disagree.

There are very few men whose opinions about Mr. Beecher's guilt or innocence are not influenced by their own religious and political beliefs, or by their social antecedents or surroundings. A curious and somewhat instructive ill.u.s.tration of the way in which a man's fate in such cases as this may be affected by considerations having no sort of relation to the facts, is afforded by the att.i.tude of the Western press toward the chief actors in the present scandal. It may be said, roughly, that while the press east of the Alleghanies has inclined in Beecher's favor, the newspapers west of them have gone somewhat savagely and persistently against him, and have treated Tilton as a martyr. The cause of such a divergence of views, considering that both Tilton and Beecher are Eastern men, is of course somewhat obscure, but we have no doubt that it is due to a vague feeling prevalent in the West that Tilton's cause is the democratic one--that is, the cause of the poor, friendless man against the rich and successful one--a feeling somewhat like that which in England enlisted the working-cla.s.ses in London on the side of the Tichborne claimant, in defiance of all reason and evidence, as a poor devil fighting a hard battle with the high and mighty. One of the reporters of a Western paper which has made important contributions to the literature of the scandal, recently accounted for his support of Tilton by declaring that in standing by him he was "fighting the battle of the Bohemians against Capital." Another Western paper, in a.n.a.lyzing the causes of the position taken by the leading New York papers on Beecher's side, ascribed it to the social relations of the editors with him, believing that they met him frequently at dinners and breakfasts, and found him a jovial companion. All this would be laughable enough if it did not show the amount of covert peril--peril against which no precautions can be taken--to which every prominent man's character is exposed. The moment he gets into a sc.r.a.pe of any kind he finds a host of persons whose enmity he never suspected clamoring to have him thrown to the beasts "on general grounds"--that is, in virtue of certain tests adopted by themselves, judged by which, apart from the facts of any particular accusation, a man of his kind is unquestionably a bad fellow. The accusation, in short, furnishes the occasion for destroying him, not necessarily the reason for it.